Lisa Sorrell, cowboy boot maker

I’ll be inseaming these boots today. The black cords hanging over the boots are the inseaming threads, which I prepared yesterday before I left work. I’m rarely ever disciplined enough to prepare them ahead of time so I’m feeling quite virtuously smug about it.

I got this pair on the last today.

I didn’t start lasting these until 5pm and the first pair was brutal. Fortunately the second pair jumped happily onto the last without a fight. It’s a good thing because I was considering lying in a sniveling, exhausted ball of sadness on the floor at the thought of lasting another pair like the first ones. A HUNGRY, sniveling, exhausted ball of sadness because the only food in the shop is granola bars and I’m not eating those!

I’d eaten half of my granola bar when I noticed this little green worm hanging off the bottom of it, AND I had a bite in my mouth. Oh well, the good news is that I’m no longer hungry.

Three pairs of boots are successfully side seamed!

And now it’s time to side seam the boots. Wish me luck.

I haven’t been working in the shop for the past week because of traveling and teaching. It feels good to be making boots again, and today they should begin to actually look like boots instead of random pieces of leather.

I have a booth at the Oklahoma Chisolm Trail Leather Guild show this weekend, selling my water-based glues and “How to Make Cowboy Boots” DVDs. Today two men came over and assumed that I was simply a worker taking care of the booth. They asked about the DVD and I assured them that it contained all the information needed to make cowboy boots. That’s when they asked me, “So, have you made a pair of boots yet?”

I’m teaching an inlay/overlay class this week, and most of our projects will be bracelets. This is the first one, and my students have joined hands in a bond of bracelet sisterhood.

I put my mother to work for me this past weekend. I have to cut off the tops of the special glue brushes I sell, and she rounded the cut-off edges on the finisher. She said it was fun.